“I had vocal polyps. It was really intense. I didn’t sleep for an entire month. There was no sound coming out. But I learned how to talk again. I learned how to sing again”: How Snail Mail's Lindsey Jordan found her falsetto and made her comeback

Five years. It’s a long time when you’re in your early 20s: a quarter of your whole life.

Lindsey Jordan was just 21 when she released her second album as Snail Mail – 2021’s beautiful, lovelorn Valentine.

Now 26, and having moved from the busy-ness of New York to the suburbs of Greensboro, North Carolina she’s just released Ricochet, the long time-coming third album that marks the second stage of her career.

No longer up and coming contender, she’s returned as one of stalwarts of 21^st Century indie rock.

The half-decade absence is partly explained by a health issue that for a while threatened to derail her career.

“I had vocal polyps. It was really intense,” she explains. “I didn’t sleep for an entire month. There was no sound coming out.

“A lot of people thought I was deaf, like cashiers and stuff. It gave me a crazy insight into how society treats deaf people – like, holy shit! But I learned how to talk again. I learned how to sing again.

“The craziest thing about it is that people could hear I’d had polyps on my previous albums. So this is the first record where I have a fresh singing voice, ever.

“It actually does feel like a positive thing. Up until I was sick I would be losing my voice every show. I now have a whole falsetto range that I never had before!”

For the writing process of Ricochet, Jordan decided to change her whole approach.

“Usually I’ll work on one song at a time and that usually means it takes about six months before I decide it’s good enough to be on the record or not. This time I thought I could expedite the process but also see if I could get rid of the ‘throwing stuff away’ process first.

“So I started as soon as I possibly could. When we were touring Valentine I was trying to write every day – a lot of riffs and chord progressions and stuff. I decided, ‘I’m going to do the lyrics at the end.’ And so with having all of the 11 songs being worked on at once, I was able to Frankenstein parts. You know, ‘That doesn’t sound great but I could take the vocal melody from here and put it in this song.’”

After she had 11 finished songs, Jordan took some time away in her house – her new house – to write the lyrics.

“When I was living in New York, for years I was like, ‘Why can’t I write here?’ I felt really self conscious about playing with neighbours about. More than 10 minutes is me being rude – you know it’s going to be a problem and the wall is going to get knocked on.

“Then I thought I should find a suburban home of my own where I could play without distraction; a place I could just spend some alone time, somewhere I could come back to from a month’s tour. And I realised I’m a suburban type – I really like the suburbs.”

For the recording too, Jordan decided to stay close to home, at Mitch Easter’s studio, Fildetorium, in Kernersvile, NC. Her friend Aron Kobayashi Ritch from the Brooklyn band Momma produced what by the sounds of it were remarkably stress-free sessions.

“The whole thing felt chill,” she recalls. “We would just get together and be like, ‘What do we want out of this one?’ We had this whole collaborative playlist that we had back and forth for years, in regards to the record. There was a lot, a lot, a lot of pre-planning.”

Whilst the Snail Mail sound is rooted in ’90s alt-rock, strings embellish tracks like Light On Our Feet and the title track, parts which Jordan wrote herself.

“On the original demos that I had started working on I added fake strings,” she says. “I have a mellotron and I used it all the time to imitate what I wanted the instruments to be. There’s fake accordion at the end of My Maker that was also played on that same device. The mellotron really got me into arranging.”

In fact, My Maker – reminiscent of early ’90s band The Sundays – was the only problematic track on the album.

Snail Mail - "My Maker" (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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“That was really hard for me,” she says. “I felt really protective of that riff, but it was really hard to write around.

“It was one of the ones that Aron helped me figure out. I was so precious about this guitar part I’d been working on for so long. The chorus was really technical for me, and trying to arrange a vocal melody around it that worked just took me forever.

“I have so many versions of it! I remember I said to Aron, ‘I’ve done it so often I can’t hear the song any more!’”

Ricochet has already picked up positive reviews with many noting the influence of ’90s rock on Jordan’s work – the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins, the Cranberries and Alanis Morissette in particular – interesting given that, having been born in June 1999, she was only alive for six months of that decade.

So what is it about ’90s music?

She thinks for a minute.

“It seemed like a lot of people were getting inventive with their chords and their tunings,” she suggests. “It just seemed like guitar music was at its peak of invention.

“There was loads of grunge stuff that I absolutely love, there was shoegaze. And people like Juliana Hatfield, Liz Phair – there was something about the singer-songwriters at that time. Maybe people were just saying, or at least trying to say something in a way that was different.”

With interest in that era currently peaking, Jordan’s time is very much now.

Probably best not to wait another five years next time, then?

“Well, I have the notes on the phone for the starting parts of four new demos,” she points out. “I definitely think I’m getting better at knowing what it is I need to do to write. So, yes, hopefully the next one won’t take that long.”